Eeek! Is Judith Curry torqued?

As a sworn science denier, Anthony Watts isn't the least impressed by the heavy hitting findings reported by the IPCC.  What he prefers (archived here) is the "heavy hitting" commentary by the new pinup girl of science deniers everywhere, Professor Judith Curry.

Just in case you didn't realise that Judith Curry has turned into an utter nutter, she is now blurting out nonsense to anyone who'll still take any notice of her.  The sensationalists and muckrakers.  They know they can get Judith to say something outrageously dumb to slake the thirst for scandal of their scientific illiterati readership.  Cosying up with a UK tabloid rag last week, Fox News this week (archived here).

Studying climate is unfortunate, sez Judy

Climate science should do a backwards rotating flip - or some such thing, sez Judith Curry.  No more studies of the atmosphere, oceans, solar radiation, clouds, sea level, the cryosphere or hurricanes.  Most definitely not ecology or biology or geology or any earth system science.

“I’m not happy with the IPCC,” she told Fox News. “I think it has torqued the science in an unfortunate direction.”

That torquing [of climate science towards climate science], she suggests, is because the money in climate science (the funding, that is) [she means the stuff that pays her salary, her department's operating budget and all her research] is tied to embellishing the IPCC narrative, especially the impacts of global warming. 

Judy is still mulling over how she'd spend the money (the funding, that is).  You've got to wonder who it is that is torqued.

Judith Curry is not at all concerned about global warming, or climate.  Blog hits are another matter.  What's really important is the number of times Judith Curry can get her name mentioned in a tabloid rag alongside Honey Boo Boo or on Fox television.  The article continues:

She is critical of the IPCC’s leadership as well, in particular its chairman, Rajendra Pachauri.
“They have explicit policy agendas,” Curry told Fox News. “Their proclamations are very alarmist and very imperative as to what we should be doing. And this does not inspire confidence in the final product.”

Translation: The IPCC has been tasked quite explicitly, which is done under the leadership of Dr Pachauri.  But Judy doesn't like the agenda the IPCC has been given, which is to report on climate science.  She calls it a "policy agenda". It's "alarmist" to inform people that, for example, seas will rise a lot within a few short decades.  The people don't deserve to know what they are doing to the world. Her "imperative" bit presumably refers to the calculation of how much more CO2 the atmosphere can hold before earth becomes a really dangerous place.

While courting Fox News readers, Judith joins a rather strange person called Anastasios Tsonis, who as far as I can make out, discounts the effect of increasing greenhouse gases in favour of a "theory" of perennially puzzled Bob Tisdale.

What a pair!  They deserve each other.

The Curious Tale of Anthony Watts and His Dog

UPDATED: Update added at the end of this article.

Today I came across a post by Anthony Watts who some readers know from his blog, WUWT.

The Part about Anthony's Dog

Anthony's apparently been surreptitiously supporting the Union of Concerned Scientists by pretending he's a dog (if I've got that right).  Anyway, he used his dog's name to subscribe, maybe thinking he needed to hide his true identity in case UCS didn't accept fake skeptics as members.

That's right, Anthony pretended to be his dog! He thinks it's hilarious that UCS accepted his subscription in his dog's name (Kenji).  Others will no doubt be bemused by the lengths to which he felt he had to go in order to 'spy' on the highly secretive (not!) UCS.

(Some of you may even call to mind Anthony's ongoing outrage at Dr Gleick pretending to be a human being with Heartland Institute.  Dog impersonations are okay but human impersonations are not.  The other difference being that the UCS is completely open, while the Heartland Institute is a very secretive organisation.)

And Now the Curious Tale

Anthony claims something the UCS wrote isn't true, while in the same article posting more than ample evidence showing that what the UCS wrote was spot on.  (Yes, if you thought Anthony was a bit odd for pretending to be his dog, what follows is even more odd.)

Enter The Union of Concerned Scientists

Watts claims this statement from the Union of Concerned Scientists is 'completely false'.  He underlined said statement in red so his readers would understand to what he is referring:

So, let's see.  Did Fox News lead in with the headline: "New Research Shows Wind Farms Cause Global Warming" or not?

Enter Fox Nation

We don't have to go to Fox News to find out, but you can if you like by clicking here.  Anthony kindly posts a screenshot of their article:

Let's examine these two statements more closely.  Maybe Watts found a letter changed somewhere:

UCS: New Research Shows Wind Farms Cause Global Warming
FOX: New Research Shows Wind Farms Cause Global Warming

Seriously?  Identical.  Even to the capitalization.

Enter Reuters

Now so far, Anthony seems oblivious to what it was that so amused/amazed/appalled The Union of Concerned Scientists.  He attempts to shift the blame, saying it wasn't Fox's fault, it was Reuters fault.

Watts is saying that all Fox did was publish an article by Reuters.

Two questions immediately arise:

1. Does Fox publish anything no matter how silly just because it arrived from one of their syndicated news providers?
2. Did the Reuters article say: New Research Shows Wind Farms Cause Global Warming.

I don't know the answer to the first question.  But it sure doesn't seem very responsible for a major international news media network to publish whatever anyone sends them no matter how absurd.

The answer to the second question meant going across to the Reuters website.  Here is their article, which has the following headline:

Okay, let's line them up again just to make sure we're not seeing things:

UCS: New Research Shows Wind Farms Cause Global Warming
FOX: New Research Shows Wind Farms Cause Global Warming
Reuters: Wind Farms may have warming effect: research

UCS accurately quoted the ridiculous headline from Fox.  Reuters had a completely different headline.

Just in case you are wondering if Reuters changed their headline at some stage, here is a link to their article using Wayback Machine.  (Watts also provides the headline from The Telegraph, which was equally misleading but different from that of Fox: "Wind farms can cause climate change, finds new study".)

What did Watts not Spot?

For starters, Anthony did not point out that Fox made up their own headline.  But as you'll have figured out already, Watts missed a much more fundamental point.

Why is the Union of Concerned Scientists amazed, amused and appalled?

Well, the research did NOT find that wind farms 'cause global warming'.  The research found that wind farms have a local warming effect.

Anthony even posts the abstract of the research paper in question, but still hasn't twigged why the Union of Concerned Scientists scoffed at the Fox News headline.

Here is the relevant part of the abstract as shown on WUWT.  Anthony even bolded the sentence about local (not global) warming "over wind farms relative to nearby non-wind-farm regions":

The World's Most Visited Anti-Science Website and Winner of the Bloggies Lifetime Achievement Award

And @bloggies wonders why science blogs have no interest in sharing a platform with their 'lifetime achievement winner' WUWT?

Give the dog a bone...

Update:

As of now the blog article referred to above attracted 74 comments, of which I read only one that may possibly have alerted Anthony to his error, but Anthony deleted it mysteriously saying (in reference to this? Surely he doesn't want to draw attention to one of his other deficiencies):

----------------

Greg Laden says:February 27, 2013 at 8:10 am[snip - no comments from you - re pending issues - Anthony]

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Summarising for people who are unfamiliar with the context, what this example illustrates quite neatly is:

1) Double standards

In Watts world, he can fake his own identity (posing as a dog!), but if someone else does so much as use an on-line identity (eg Sou), Watts calls them "anonymous cowards" at best or effectively calls for them to be flogged drawn and quartered.

What is even more ridiculous is that Watts felt he needed to fake his identity at all - as if he thinks there is a 4,000 strong inner UCS sanctum that operates in secrecy. (The Union of Concerned Scientists doesn't set criteria for membership AFAIK. Anyone can join, even a someone posing as a dog! I don't know if they boot people out for any reason.  Most organisations have some base criteria.)

Makes you wonder what sort of circles Watts usually inhabits?  (Such weird thinking is consistent with the notion that almost ALL the scientists, journalists, politicians and the majority of the general public are part of a decades long conspiracy to deceive the few remaining science deniers, and that climate science is a 'hoax'.)  

2) Cognitive difficulties - critical reading and arithmetic in particular

Watts didn't pick up on 'global' vs 'local'. Watts may not even know that there is a difference between a local effect and a global effect. That would go some way to explaining his ongoing obsession with individual surface stations long after it's been proven time and time again that individual stations being out balances out once they are aggregated.  (This includes a paper that listed Watts himself as one of the authors.  Seems that comprehending the findings of a paper is not a pre-requisite for being listed as an author.)